

ABC Rewind
ABC Australia
The History Listen is now ABC Rewind, the home of gripping narrative history series. Dive into true stories told by the people who lived through them.
Episodes
Mentioned books

Aug 23, 2022 • 0sec
The Loveday Trilogy Part 1 | Oskar Speck
The story of one man's mind-bendingly long kayak journey that lead to an Australian Detention camp in World War 2.

Aug 16, 2022 • 0sec
Maiden's Eucalypts
This story is set on Worimi and Biripi country in the year 1894 The avid colonial botanist Joseph Maiden is making a trip through the forests around the NSW towns of Stroud and Gloucester, recording every tree, leaf, and plant he encounters in meticulous detail in his journal. 130 years later historian Jodi Frawley re-traces Maiden's journey, using his original records as a guide.

Aug 9, 2022 • 28min
Inexpressible Island
The little known story of perhaps the greatest endurance feat in Antarctic history. The survival of Robert Falcon Scott's Northern Party in the winter of 1912.

Aug 2, 2022 • 26min
The man with the wooden shotgun
Britta Jorgensen grew up hearing many tales about her great Uncle Keith Byson, whose life sounded like something out of a children's story book - that he was a hermit who lived in a shack on a deserted island in the Great Barrier Reef, warding off strangers with a wooden shotgun, and who got around in his underwear. Years after his death Britta heads to her uncle's island home, to try and sort out the truth from the tall tales

Jul 26, 2022 • 29min
Finding Harry Valentine
Hidden family truths are discovered as two sisters follow the trail of their late fathers' secret life.

Jul 19, 2022 • 29min
First port of asylum
On the night Dai Le was elected to Federal Parliament as an Independent she was remembering being a frightened 10 years old, out in the open sea, escaping Vietnam in a boat. For The History Listen Dai returns to the place she first landed, Hong Kong, looking for traces of the refugee camp where she lived, worked in factories and like so many thousands, waited for a visa to The West.

Jul 12, 2022 • 29min
Fanny Smith: Icon
In 1899, twenty-three years after her people were declared ‘extinct’, Fanny Smith made a revolutionary recording where she announced to the world that she was The Last Tasmanian. Far from ‘extinct’, she was a proud Aboriginal woman raising her eleven children and publicly singing and speaking her Pakana language. This is her extraordinary story.

Jul 5, 2022 • 29min
The Friendship Spitfire: Jack Dawson Green's WW2 story
A story of swagger, bravery, skill and ultimately, friendship, set on the frontline of war

Jun 28, 2022 • 29min
Acting on a High Wire - a short history of television drama
From the very first night that ABC television beamed into loungerooms around Australia, it offered audiences live drama, initially plays and then serials. The story of the generation of pioneers who helped to create a new art form, shake off the cultural shackles of England, and pave the way for the Australian television which went on to conquer the world.

Jun 21, 2022 • 29min
Too Old To Run - the Drug Grannies ep 2
In the summer of 1978, Australian narcotics agents intercepted a campervan being unloaded on the Melbourne docks. What they discovered inside the van turned out to be the largest haul of an illicit substance, black hashish, to land on Australian soil at the time. The campervan belonged to two elderly American women tourists, whose overseas holiday odyssey quickly spiralled into a hellish nightmare.


